Romance of sisters' works inspire dance

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Kristin Haight and Brock Adams in Brontë, an homage to the brooding, romantic writing of the Brontë sisters. (SUPPLIED PHOTO)

When Winnipeg choreographer Gaile Petursson-Hiley was a teenager, she saw a movie that took hold of her so strongly, it's still affecting her nearly 40 years later.

It was the 1970 version of Wuthering Heights, starring Timothy Dalton as the brooding Heathcliff and Anna Calder-Marshall as his soulmate, Cathy.

"I just fell passionately in love with this movie," recalls the former member of Winnipeg's Contemporary Dancers, now in her 50s and a longtime teacher in the professional program at the WCD School.

In fact, the sensitive teen and her boyfriend were so swept up in the story of doomed love on the moors that they started dressing in the style of the mid-1800s.

"We kind of lived in that century," she remembers. "For probably about a year, every time I went by the theatre, I would burst into tears.... I'm such a romantic at heart. I love the passion."

The movie was Petursson-Hiley's introduction to the socially confined yet wildly imaginative world of England's Brontë sisters, Emily, Charlotte and Anne. It led her to read the sisters' poetry and classic novels, including Emily's Wuthering Heights and Charlotte's Jane Eyre.

Now, all these years later, she has created a one-hour dance piece called Brontë. The five-dancer show runs this weekend at the Rachel Browne Theatre in the Crocus Building.

It's the second full-length presentation by Mouvement Winnipeg Dance Projects, which Petursson-Hiley co-founded four years ago to present occasional works performed by young, emerging dancers.

Brontë, which had a lengthy development process with input from the dancers, features a couple who are established rather than emerging: WCD company member Kristin Haight and James Phillips, a graduate of the WCD School who has just beaten out 130 other dancers for a coveted job with the Montreal company O Vertigo.

The other three dancers are Brock Adams, Darby Gibbs and Kathleen Price Hiley, who is Petursson-Hiley's 24-year-old daughter.

Brontë doesn't tell a story or portray specific characters from the novels. Rather, it's an abstract piece, inspired by images and feelings evoked by the sisters' writings. The music is a collage of works that have a common element of cello. The set includes towers made from glued-together stacks of books with their covers removed.

Petursson-Hiley, a West End resident, describes how she hauled hundreds of used books home from Value Village -- the same place where she scrounged up, then reworked, the Brontë costumes.

That leads her to confess that she habitually used to spend so much time at the Value Village on Ellice Avenue, she now works there two days a week.

"I really don't have time to work there, but I just love it! They have some beautiful vintage pieces -- they're like works of art.

"I've gathered so many -- I'm really addicted. Even if they don't fit me, I just hang them up in my bedroom so I can look at them."

alison.mayes@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition September 17, 2009 D4